In Closing Up Shop I wrote:

So by early summer of 1964 my mother had closed up shop and sold all her equipment. My parents had bought the house next to Rufe Robinson (I think it went for $16,500 at the public sale, if memory serves). It was actually a house that Rufe Robinson had built years before along with the one that he was living in now. Rufe was by this time an elderly man, a widower, and didn’t get around very well any more. 

My parents sold the half-a-house on West Main Street, but I don’t know for how much and we moved to South Race. It was such a painless move, I don’t remember anything about the move itself. 

It may have even been late spring when we moved because my mother planted a garden. (Or perhaps she planted the garden the following spring, I can’t really be sure.) And the corn grew as high as an elephant’s eye.

As it happens, I can fact check that now.

In the August 7, 1964, edition of the Lebanon Daily News there is this:

So I was wrong about moving in late spring. It couldn’t have been until August, and that was definitely too late to plant a garden. Although it could have been dug up for the following year.

And the $16,500 was definitely wrong. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure about that figure, but I was certain that it was north of $15,000. So I was way off.

What I didn’t mention is during the public sale my grandfather (on my father’s side) was there. He had recently retired and sold his farm, and my parents were hoping that he would give them the funds to purchase the house. I was never privy to their finances, so I have absolutely no idea how much of the purchase price they were putting in and how much they were asking him for. Or why, since they both had jobs, they didn’t just get a mortgage, which I’m sure they could have easily qualified for. But I’m sure they had their reasons, and I do know that they were always very careful about money matters.

For that matter I have no idea how they funded the house on West Main Street and the renovations that were needed to convert the kitchen in the back room to a beauty shop and move the kitchen to the dining room. A mortgage? Or did they have savings to cover it all or most of it? They never told me and I never asked. I wish I had asked them about it when I was older, because I’m very curious now.

So my grandfather was there on the day of the sale, and he had taken a tour of the house, and I can still picture him leaning on his cane when the bidding on the house began. As my parents put in their bids to the auctioneer, they’d look to my grandfather to see if he was ok with the price and as long as he kept nodding, they kept bidding. And of course, they got the house.

The other thing about that article is it tells me that they sold the house on West Main Street for only three hundred dollars more than they paid for it. This despite the fact that they had put in a modern kitchen and made a few other improvements. Of course, they had also moved the kitchen from the back room into the dining room and now that back room was no longer a beauty shop and no longer a kitchen, so I guess it evened out.